The Gardens of Horace — About This Work
Jean Baptiste Camille Corot, 1855 (printed 1921)
About the Work
The Gardens of Horace belongs to the remarkable group of landscapes Corot made using cliché-verre, a process poised somewhere between drawing, printmaking and photography. Instead of working directly on paper, Corot scratched his image into a coated glass plate; light then carried those marks onto sensitised paper. The result has the immediacy of a drawing, but with a distinctly luminous, almost photographic atmosphere.
Here the landscape is built from a dense web of lines. Slender trunks rise through the composition while darker masses of foliage gather around them, opening towards a softer, more distant space. A small figure is easy to overlook at first. That imbalance of scale makes the setting feel larger and more enveloping, as though the viewer has entered a place rather than simply looked at a view.
The title invokes Horace, the Roman poet whose writing celebrated rural retreat and the pleasures of a life removed from public bustle. Corot does not illustrate a particular passage. Instead, the association gives the scene a reflective, classical character: a cultivated landscape imagined as a place of quiet, memory and withdrawal.
The Work
Artist: Jean Baptiste Camille Corot
Title: The Gardens of Horace
Date: 1855 (printed 1921)
Medium: Cliché-verre on cream wove paper
Recorded dimensions: Image: 29.4 × 36.7 cm
Sheet: 30.5 × 38.5 cm
Collection: The Cleveland Museum of Art
Accession number: 1925.556
Print & Presentation
Palatine presentation: 40 × 50 cm.
The complete artwork is reproduced at its recorded scale, subject only to negligible whole-pixel rounding, without enlargement, reduction, cropping or distortion. The surrounding white presentation area accommodates the artwork within the framed presentation and is incorporated into the print rather than added as a separate mount.
Frame finishes: Black, White or Natural.
Paper & glazing: Enhanced Matte + Perspex; Enhanced Matte + Moth-Eye.
Why Original Scale?
Most art-print shops offer the same image in a choice of Small, Medium and Large sizes. We take a different approach. For each edition, we begin with the recorded dimensions of the original work and reproduce the complete image at that scale, preserving its proportions and avoiding enlargement, reduction, cropping or distortion.
Source: Image: The Cleveland Museum of Art, CC0.
Care: Display in a dry interior away from prolonged direct sunlight and sources of moisture.
Notes from Palatine
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Palatine Editions · Original Scale Editions · palatineeditions.com